


nothing beside remains

by wnnbdarklord



Category: The Cabin in the Woods (2011)
Genre: Apocalypse, Blood, Gen, Post-Movie(s), Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 08:26:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8883811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wnnbdarklord/pseuds/wnnbdarklord
Summary: They've somehow survived and it's a gift horse Marty definitely knows he should give a thorough dental exam to. But he can't think about that just yet, not when the glaring sterile lights make everything slightly surreal. 

 
--
Marty and Dana survive the apocalypse. There's less of a bang than they'd expected.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [angelheadedhipster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelheadedhipster/gifts).



> This was a fun, if sometimes frustrating fic to write. I hope my recipient likes it :)
> 
> Many thanks to my beta. Comments and kudos always appreciated!

The facility is utterly abandoned. No ancient gods, no monsters, no other people. Just them. The only evidence that anything has happened at all are the rivers of blood coating the once shining white walls and floors.

Their feet squish with viscera and clatter bones away. Some of the bones still bear distinctive teeth marks.

Marty wants to throw up. Not just because of the evidence of the death they had unleashed, but also the thick coppery tang that coats the back of his throat whenever he breathes.

Dana is beside him. She looks as shaky as he feels, completely covered in blood and staring around herself in a daze.

_Look upon our works, ye mighty…_

Good thing he got the despair over with a gun and a werewolf ago. Marty also stares. There is so much blood. Before, in the chaos and sheer bloody (ha!) mindedness of the need to survive, it had not seemed so much. There had been no time to think about it. Ever since the cabin, there had been no time to think. It had just been a blur of adrenaline soaked terror and strength and the need to live _live live_. Now, thinking is all that he can do.

They've somehow survived and it's a gift horse Marty definitely knows he should give a thorough dental exam to. But he can't think about that just yet, not when the glaring sterile lights make everything slightly surreal.

Stuff like this isn't supposed to happen in brightly lit places. It's supposed to happen in exactly the kind of places those freaks had first unleashed the creepy redneck zombie family on them. Dark woods in dark cabins in the middle of nowhere. Not in places that could be some generic office spaces  and laboratories if not for the lack of windows.

Instead, they can see all the blood and gore and damage in glaring detail. It takes them a long time to stop staring and move deeper into the facility, hands clasped in desperate reassurance that they were not alone.

* * *

They manage to find an infirmary. Apart from the vivisected body on the operating table (dead now, thankfully), it's mostly clean of blood.

Dana almost cries when they find out the decontamination showers still work. There are even clean scrubs. They take turns. Marty feels only marginally more human once all the blood and gore and zombie guts are off of him. From the nervous way Dana is hugging herself, she probably feels the same.

He lets her help him clean the wound in his back. The antiseptic burns so much he almost bites through his lip trying to keep from screaming. But he'd rather this burn than get an infection from zombie cooties. Or maybe an actual Zombie Infection. He's blessedly distracted from the thought once Dana pokes the needle into his skin. She sutures him up the best she can.

His hands shake as he pulls his shirt on. It's slow going, both from the pain and the need to not rip out the stitches. He would rather not go through Dana's stitching again any time soon.

"Your turn," he says when he finally manages it. Dana won't meet his eyes. Marty blinks and wants to hit himself. She'd been mauled by that werewolf. She'd been _dying_. Should be dead, he knows. How had he not realized this until now?

"Dana?"

"I'm fine," she says, arms once more hugging herself. Marty can see the pale scars winding around her neck where gaping wounds should have been.

"Does this mean you're a werewolf now?"

He winces when she flinches.

"Hey, it's cool. I mean, if the world actually ended, you're probably going to be better equipped for it than I am."

She shrugs, finally looking up.

"I don't really feel any different."

Marty can only shrug in return.

"Not like I know what rules apply here either."

She looks away, her attention caught by the corpse on the table. There's a strange hunger in her eyes that Marty does his best not to think about.

"Maybe we should find out," she says, turning away. Marty follows her out of the infirmary.

* * *

The facility is still completely powered, which is another strange thing in a long winding line of strangeness.

Marty can't help but stare at the vending machine. It is still lit, scrolling text merrily informing them that they need to insert a dollar to access the junk food inside. The corridor around it is, like everything else, covered in blood. But the vending machine is clean, only a bloody handprint on the glass indicating it had ever witnessed the massacre within this place. He is deeply unnerved by it, even as his stomach rumbles.

"I think I found the main control room," Dana's voice breaks the spell the machine had put on him. Marty gives it one last wary glance before following her into another room. The vault door is warped and broken, barely hanging onto the hinges. Much like the rest of the place, it is covered in blood and what looks like explosion damage.

There's a streak of blood along the floor, like something had dragged itself to and fro. There's a gaping hole in the ceiling. Marty doesn't want to know what had made that.

The room itself looks like a budget version of mission control. Screens and computer stations line the walls. They still have power and are showing camera footage of the cabin and the area around it.

"They were watching us," Dana says. She doesn't even sound surprised anymore, just exhausted. He knows the feeling.

"Yeah, before I got zombie-napped, I found one of them in my room. Pretty creepy."

He's less interested in what he already knows. Another screen catches his eye. It's the Earth, scattered dots on it blinking red. The screens to his right, showing images of burning buildings and dead monsters, captioned with place names clue him in on what the bigger screen means.

"It wasn't just us," he says. The Director had said something about other cultures, but Marty had been paying more attention to surviving than wondering about what she might have meant.

There are at least fifty other facilities around the world, the angry red blinking all proclaiming failure.

"They all failed," Dana says, looking at the screens with him, "All of them."

"Makes you wonder if the evil old gods were trying to tell them something," Marty jokes. It's not particularly funny, but he's grasping for whatever will work.

"Maybe they were," Dana says, "That woman said if one of them slept, all of them did. Maybe they wanted to wake up."

"Gee, that makes me feel so much better," Marty says under his breath. Not being dead is nice, but not being dead and not being the reason the apocalypse happened would be nicer. The stab wound in his back itches. He ignores it.

He approaches the computers and taps a few buttons. He tries to ignore the sticky feeling of coagulating blood against the keys. The view on the monitors shifts and a menu is brought up.

"I think it's time we see what the hell happened," he says. He tries to bring up the facility footage at the time the old gods awoke. The footage before is there, but as the shaking of the cameras intensifies, the screens snow out. Only a strange sound, one they could feel in their bones, echoes from the speakers. It gets louder and louder until Marty thinks his ears will start bleeding and then - silence. The cameras start working again, showing everything perfectly functional and deserted. The only sign of anything ever happening is the blood smeared everywhere. They watch themselves emerge from the ritual chamber, pale and shaking.

Marty cut off the footage.

"Well, that was a pile of nothing."

"Can we get satellite footage of the outside?" Dana asks. She's back to staring at the screens where the other failures are being shown.

"Piece of cake," Marty mutters, "Let me just hack into government satellites - oh." 

There's an option in the menu to do just that. Who were these people? You'd think a super secret organization dedicated to killing people ritually wouldn't have such a user friendly interface.

He starts with their college town. It's deserted, which it really shouldn't be considering it's only noon. The closer he looks though, the more he can see evidence of something wrong. Bloodstains and scorch marks, buildings in ruins and things on fire. He zooms out and feels a chill at a line of holes marking the street that look suspiciously like giant footprints.

Movement in his peripheral vision makes him focus on another screen. Army trucks are racing past, the people inside are panicked, but also armed and looking ready to kick ass.

"Good news, we aren't the last people alive on Earth," he says, trying to inject some pep into his tone, "Bad news, I think all those beasties that aren't here anymore are out there."

"Is it on the news?" Dana asks, moving closer to him. The back of his neck prickles in awareness of her at his back. He twitches, suppressing the movement. It's just Dana, not a zombie out to dismember him.

Marty switches the screens to show half a dozen different news channels. All around the world are scenes of carnage and chaos, of monsters emerging from the ground and gods walking the earth. But there's also scenes of people prevailing against them.

Marty and Dana watch one of the giant gods fall in a hail of missiles, its great corpse crushing an entire city. He fancies he can hear that deep _wrong_ sound again as it dies. He's shivering and so is Dana.

The newscasters are speaking frantically, narrating the events. They inform people of multiple earthquakes and tsunamis occurring whenever one of the titans fall. They watch as the entirety of the South Pacific is wiped from the map as a giant wave crests over the islands.

"Oh my god," Dana whispers. Marty can't look away. Deciding to survive was easy when you didn't have to watch the consequences of it, the enormity of seeing so many people die in an instant. Saying that society needed to crumble was easy when you weren't watching it crumble before your eyes. The crumbling was supposed to be less literal than actual old gods destroying everything.

For hours, they can't do anything but watch.

* * *

"How are we still alive? They were right under us, this whole place should be rubble!" Dana says, finally breaking the silence that had fallen on them. She starts pacing, her feet squishing in the sticky blood on the floor.

He and Dana should be smears on the wall, not alive to watch the end of the world.  

"I think they wanted us to see," Marty says, knowing in his bones he was right. Dana stops pacing. Her eyes are haunted.

"Everything about this, the ritual, the cameras. It's like a game to them. Opiate of the gods," he continues, huffing out a humorless laugh, "You said it before. They wanted us punished."

"And what better punishment than to watch the world end," Dana agrees.

"Bet you wished you shot me now, huh?" Marty says, not entirely joking. Dana flinches. She stares at the screens, still displaying death and destruction.

"No," she says, "I think you were right. It wasn't worth it. They watched us and others before us just die for-for _for sport_ . They're still playing with us. Only now, they're making _us_ watch."

Making them face their choices. Because that was the thing, wasn't it? However much they were manipulated into this position, they'd still made _choices_. Especially at the end. He'd chosen to let the world end, too disillusioned with it, too traumatized by events to think about anything but himself. A giant fuck you to the world that had allowed this to happen to him. He hadn't loved the world enough to save it, not then.

"Then let's make them choke on it," he says, "There's got to be something in this place that can help us."

He remembers the map in one of the hallways they'd passed looking for this place, helpfully labelled. Remembers the floor labelled 'Archives'.

"No more running," Dana says, something wild and hungry in the gleam of her eyes.

Something of the wolf about her, Marty thought with a hysterical giggle.

"Let's kick some old god butt," he says instead of voicing the thought, "And make sure they stay down this time."

It's the least they can do.

 

**END**

 


End file.
